Conferences

Abstract

The strategy of ‘peaceful penetration’¹ appeared to have got off to an auspicious start when the New Economic Policy (NEP), effectively de-nationalising small-scale industry and retail trade and returning to more orthodox principles of public finance and law, was endorsed by the Tenth Congress of the Russian Communist Party in March 1921. Its decisions, the Review of Reviews declared, had been ‘in favour of the abandonment of Communism’. The ‘Communistic experiment had failed’, commented the New Statesman; Lenin was now ‘driving the Russian State furiously back on the road to capitalism… All in Russia acknowledge this save a handful of desperate doctrinaires’.² Lenin, added the Spectator, the author and head of the organisation which had administered Communism by means of the Soviets, had ‘admitted the economic collapse of his system’. It was now conceded that the abolition of private enterprise and private commerce had been a ‘disastrous fiasco’, wrote the Economist; the Soviet leaders themselves admitted that the ‘attempt to force Communism on the nation had failed’. From a business point of view, the paper added, there were ‘undoubtedly big possibilities’.³